Electronic financial transactions are ubiquitous, from both personal and institutional viewpoints. Securing and trading of commodities in the international private banking and trading sectors require that the forefront of computer and network security be constantly evolving at a rapid technological pace. A good discussion of the meta-technical issues involving web-based electronic businesses is provided by the collection of articles in Architectural Issues of Web-Enabled Electronic Businesses (Idea Group, 2003) edited by Shi and Murthy, which is incorporated herein by reference.
In a simplified form, the electronic transaction space of the electronic auction, such as E-bay may represent a primitive and fully moderated form of Stephenson's vision. The modern electronic auction may be conducted in near-real-time or any number of variations. A detailed review of the electronic transaction environment is discussed in the texts Digital Dealing: How E-Markets are Transforming the Economy (Norton, 2002) by Robert E. Hall and The Future of E-Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2001) by Martin Bichler. These two texts are hereby incorporated by reference herein. FIG. 1 is a representation a series of transactions in an electronic environment of personal or corporate electronic transaction/auction, which many entities exist in various electronic transactional representational formats.
The direction that the ubiquitous electronic transaction will take our individual and corporate transactions and wealth is unpredictable. Currency transactions appear to be less relevant as multi-national units appear, such as the Euro, although there does not appear to be an international drive towards a universal currency, as evidenced by the problems in implementing the “euro” across western Europe. In the classic science fiction novel, Snow Crash (Bantam 2000) author Neal Stephenson depicts a “cyberspace” in which entire economies exist in an electronic world in which persons, business, and governments are represented by “avatars” or representations that are electronic “alter-egos” of the entity in question. This is shown by the illustration in FIG. 2 in which “virtual transactional space” is represented in a sample transaction. This concept has been exploited by other science-fiction authors in such fiction books as The NeuromancerTrilogy (1984) by William Gibson (software representations of personalities and are capable of bargaining long after the actual person had died), The Diamond Age (1999) by Stephenson (taxation is no longer possible because governments cannot effectively tax virtual transactions). Yet, electronic transactions can be monitored by specialized chips (“snooper chips” has been proposed) and tracing and freezing the assets of a rogue or unlawful organization has never been easier. It is unclear whether the pervasiveness of the electronic transaction will give us more privacy from government and/or licit or illicit information seekers or less.
As early the 1970s, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke depicted a scenario in which the world's economy could be “electronically frozen” due to a widespread panic coupled with a series of major bank computer malfunctions. The depiction was that it took so long to undo all the electronic accounts to determine that the major global economies have virtually collapsed.
Clarke's depiction of widespread economic chaos due to a chain reaction series of electronic malfunctions may be farfetched, but the concern was real when many technicians thought that the embedded code in many older financial transactional system could have raised real headaches during “Y2K” crisis, which never materialized in any significant manner. However, more severe is the unsettling of mid-sized national economies (such as Argentina in 2001 or pacific rim countries in 1997) due to political or economic crises or improper or later interventions by stabilizing institutions. However, these devaluations/collapses have not spread to the larger stable economies of the G8. Alternately, large financial institutions may provide their own stable “currency” and provide some security though their assets in securing transactions between parties or investments. However, these entities are governed try natural laws and subject to currency fluctuations or national economic collapses and cannot guarantee the stability of their security.